Hadron Therapy: A study on Grid Databases and Monte Carlo Simulations

Hadron therapy is a novel technique of cancer radiation therapy using beams of energetic protons, neutrons, or positive ions for cancer treatment. In the context of this thesis, two individual projects have been performed, both of them having a direct relevance with Hadron Therapy. The first part consists of a literature analysis of six different projects. The common characteristic of these projects is that they are dealing with the distribution of large amounts of data, among geographically distributed user teams. The solutions proposed are exploiting either Grid, or parallel databases implementations, or combinations of these two technologies. The objectives of the authors, the technical details of the implementations as well as the security issues of each proposal, have been extracted from the original papers, and are being juxtapositioned. Comparison tables between the different software and hardware choices of each implementation have been produced, while the benefits or the drawbacks of each choice, that are being stated by the authors, are also being quoted. The overall aim of the present study is to discuss the choice of certain software and hardware infrastructures in combination with the problem that has to be addressed each time. The scope of the present study, is to be used as a bibliographic reference for future studies, in order to be decided if these same infrastructures are proper and eligible to be used in PART NER’s rare tumor database platform, or other similar projects. In the second part of the present thesis, a systematic Monte - Carlo simulation study of five typical accelerator materials (Boron Nitride, Carbon, Copper, Iron and Stainless Steel) is being presented. The overall aim of this study was to assess the radiological risk in case of accidental irradiation of the accelerators’ surrounding materials. Using a simplified geometry of a right cylinder, the five materials were bombarded with a proton beam of energy in the range of 50MeV up to 400MeV. This range of energy is typical of intermediate energy proton accelerators used as injector to higher energy machines, as research accelerators for intermediate nuclear energy physics, and in hadron therapy. The ambient dose equivalent (H(10)) was scored in a distance up to 1 meter from the bottom, top and lateral surfaces of the cylinder, for seven different cooling times, as well as the residual nuclei inventory in the target. Moreover, the escaping neutron spectra were scored for all the materials and the aforementioned energies. Also, a case study of the neutron population variation with and without a concrete tunnel around the target was considered. The material of this thesis is going to be used as a handbook from the interested research teams in CERN.